Epistasis explored
When people work together, some individuals may hinder team performance—essentially masking the abilities of other members—while others may boost the group’s performance beyond the...
Sep, 01, 2011
To understand biology—and provide appropriate medical care—scientists need to understand interactions across multiple scales. Hence the Physiome.
This is the reality of human biology: events span a 109 range in lengthscale (molecular to organismal) and a 1014 range in timescale (molecular movement to years). To understand this biology—...
Jun, 01, 2010
Simulations can teach us how young bodies and faces develop; how an artery compensates for decades of fatty plaque deposits by growing and thickening its walls; how tissue engineers can best coax endothelial cells to develop into organized sheets of skin for burn patients; and how cancerous tumors invade neighboring tissue.
For better or for worse, and on many levels, our tissues never stop growing and changing. While developing from childhood to old age, we grow not only bone, cartilage, fat, muscle and skin, but also...
Apr, 01, 2008
A standard dictionary definition of a network is “an interconnected or interrelated chain, group, or system.” A cursory look at our surroundings shows that networks are ubiquitous. For...
Oct, 01, 2007
How can they help us understand proteins?
Graphs, or networks, have been widely adopted in computational biology, with examples including protein-protein interaction networks, gene regulatory networks, and residue interaction networks in...
Jun, 20, 2013
Cancer proteins highly interactive
New research suggests that cancer proteins, like influential people, have the most connections. These results, from an extensive study of how human proteins interact with one another, could help...
Jan, 01, 2007
Finding the Master Regulators
A cell may change states several times in its lifetime—from a stem cell to a specialized cell, for example, or from a normal cell to a cancerous one. Each time this happens, a veritable army of...
Apr, 01, 2010
Advances in technology have brought to molecular biology datasets that are bigger, more sophisticated, and, unfortunately, more difficult to interpret than ever before. One computational analysis...
Jun, 01, 2005
The National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research has recently completed the first stage of an ambitious program to expand the computational infrastructure and software tools needed to...
Jan, 01, 2006
Working in silico, researchers hone in on candidate proteins worthy of laboratory work
By stringing together amino acids in a prescribed sequence that then folds into a defined structure, nature designs proteins to perform specific functions. Nowadays, computational researchers are...
Sep, 01, 2011